I am fascinated by song stories...the glimpses of composers' lives that their creations permit us to see, although oftentimes not so readily. Here are my my "scoops", posted here for your enjoyment, and for what I hope will feed our mutual curiosity about His musical purposes for us. Join me in this history adventure, as we find what circumstances coalesced to create the songs we all love! Play detective with me, and tell me what song "scoops" you may know that I don't...yet.

About Me

Friday, April 24, 2015

His words read like a pledge, such as one might make to a
parole board in a penitentiary. William Matthew Golden certainly had an opinion
in 1918 about what he thought “A Beautiful Life” might resemble, and perhaps
that was because his life had not really gone the way he thought it should for
someone whose aim was to enter into God’s presence. If a 40-something was in
trouble, maybe in a prison and perhaps engaged in hard labor (as in this 1911 picture,
in Mississippi’s state pen), yet thought about how to turn around his
circumstances, what would he say? More importantly, what would he do to make
good on his oath? Are you and I, more or less, in the same boat with William
Golden?

In 1918, William Golden may have been a 42-year old state penitentiary
inmate, whose circumstances might have compelled him to see that he needed to
make some changes. He reportedly wrote
most of the 22 songs credited to him while in prison. He composed at least one
song--“Will My Mother Know Me There?”-- in 1906, “To Canaan’s Land in 1914, and
“A Beautiful Life” in 1918, but at what point his eight-year prison life began
and ended is not clear. Also, did he initiate his songwriting habit while in
prison, or before then? Since he was born and died in Mississippi, we can speculate
that it was perhaps the state prison in Parchman (northwestern Mississippi),
known as Parchman Farm in the Mississippi River Delta region, where Golden was
incarcerated and made a vow about his future. It’s said that Golden (whose last
name was originally Golding) served eight years for his prison term, so his
crime may have been one of the comparatively lesser offenses, although there is
no information on what he did to earn his sentence. Could his songwriting have earned him good
behavior points with the prison authorities? Was he the product of a chaplain
at Parchman who helped him seek out reform, or was he self-taught? One also
wonders if Golden’s new life manifested itself while he was still behind bars.
If it did, he went about helping others who were sick, poor, or needy;
practiced purity; and spoke kind words to others – all sentiments that he
reasoned in his five verses were expressions of “A Beautiful Life”. Golden even
added his own name to the first verse’s first line, perhaps as a means to remind
himself that the words and proposed actions were an intimate promise.

What exactly motivated William Golden’s songwriting ventures
is unclear, but the Divine presence can use any situation to carry out His
purposes. Was it the death of Golden’s one offspring in childhood that moved
him initially to song composition, or a prison term, or some other events that
are not known? Is Providence proscribed by any of these, or do they in fact
hasten His influence? Whatever caused Golden’s descent into prison, that didn’t
stop God from working in him, an insight that must have dawned upon this
composer and moved him to generate most of his life’s musical output in that
setting. Perhaps all of us should think of ourselves in a prison…